In August 2008, Jim Miller was on his computer, checking race results. The USA cycling director of athletics calls himself a "chronic result watcher," and one of his many jobs is to spot rising stars, to identify and nourish young talent. It's not as simple a task as picking out future LeBron Jameses and Peyton Mannings. Greatness in team sports usually announces itself early and loudly, and is marked by bold headlines and breathless hyperbole. Unknown but promising cyclists, at least in the United States, don't inspire headlines at all; they don't often attract the attention of quasilegal agents or inspire major university scholarship wars. No one offers to buy them SUVs.

To find talent, if you're USA cycling director of athletics, you scroll through computer pages and you look at race results. Miller noticed an interesting one. It was from the Green Mountain women's race, in Vermont. One of his USA cycling team members had won the elite/pro division, which wasn't extraordinary, but when Miller checked out the Women's Cat 3/4 race—the near-novice level—he saw that the winner's time was four minutes faster than the pro's.

There was a story circulating on cycling chat boards about that race. According to the tall tale—it had to be a tall tale, it was so ridiculous—the woman who'd posted that surprising result had been racing for all of a month, worked full-time on Wall Street and had done most of her training inside, watching television. And according to the rumors—and they had to be just rumors, because they were so outlandish—the most absurd and delicious detail of that performance was that on the final, long climb the rider had left her race completely behind and ridden all the way up to the pack of elite and pro cylists, who'd started five minutes before. Some of the best women riders in the country, on their custom-made machines, had looked up to see a tiny, brown-haired investment banker on a cheap maroon bike, using her granny gear, pass them by. It was a wonderful fairy tale. It turned out to be true in every detail.

The account of that ride was certainly enough to stir the hearts of anyone who has ever toted up numbers on a spreadsheet or proofread a document late at night in an office while dreaming of crossing a finish line in triumph. But fairy tales, even the true ones, do not move Miller. He is a deeply, steadfastly empirical man. He has heard lots of stories about big hearts and inspirational attacks. Stories are nice, but when it comes to elite-level cycling, professional cycling, what matters is talent and work—hard, grueling long-term labor—and tactics and toughness. Those are the things that bring results, plural. Miller made a note to himself to check up on how the novice was doing in a few months.

In February 2009, Miller was checking results again and saw that the novice had won a stage in Arizona's four-day Valley of the Sun race. He did some more checking and found out that the win was her eighth in just eight months of racing. Champions don't rise from nowhere. Miller knew that. He knew that bankers—or dentists, or lawyers, or paramedics—who ride their bicycles for fun and fitness don't one day decide they're going to ditch the day job, turn pro and start dropping the strongest racers in the world. Maybe in a movie or a novel, but not in real life. Miller thought there must be something else to this novice's story. Something missing. He tracked down the young woman's contact information.

"I sent her an email and introduced myself and asked what her story was," Miller says. "And she sent me back a book."

Here's the short version of the Evelyn Stevens story: Career girl meets bike. Loves bike. Guy sees career girl on bike, suggests she come to Central Park for a racing clinic. Girl enters a few races for fun, wins one, then another, then a few more, inspires crushes, awe and disbelieving adoration on bicycling chat boards. ("Evelyn Stevens drives an ice-cream truck covered in human skulls!" is a fairly representative sample; another is "Evelyn Stevens once made Chuck Norris beg for mercy.") Girl wins a few more races, then quits 12-hour-a-day Wall Street job, signs pro contract, finishes 15th in the World Championships, prompts talk that she is the next great female cyclist in the United States, and maybe even the world, looks forward to a life doing exactly what she loves best. All in approximately 18 months. It is the happiest, sunniest, most unlikely story about professional bicycling you will ever read.

The longer version is even more preposterous.

She is the fourth of five children. As a toddler in Acton, a suburb of Boston, she spoke too fast, and not too well. She had particular trouble pronouncing the sounds of R and S, and she struggled with language comprehension. For seven years, from kindergarten through the sixth grade, Harriet Stevens, a special-education teacher, took her lisping little girl to

After-school classes. For seven years, Evelyn recited, Liza Doolittle-like, "When the redbird flies in the sky" until she got it right.

Another child might have grown self-conscious or chastened. Evelyn decided she wanted to be president when she grew up. Either that or a reporter. She was elected president of her junior high school. She played soccer and ran track, and when she tried out for high-school tennis, the coach put her on the varsity team.

She also played varsity tennis at Dartmouth College, where she studied government and gender studies, and when she graduated, she took a job in New York City, at Lehman Brothers. She still spoke fast, but now, more clearly. She was 25 years old, living in New York City's Murray Hill neighborhood and working on Wall Street. She shared a summer rental in the Hamptons. She had a boyfriend, good pals from college and from Lehman Brothers, where she worked as an analyst and made, by most of the world's definition, stupid money. She worked fairly stupid hours, too. She would arrive at the office at 9 a.m., and stay till 10. Or 11. Or midnight. Or one or two.

"I was mostly doing PowerPoint presentations," she says. "They'd say to me on Friday night, 'Evie [pronounced EHvee], we're having a pitch on Monday, and here's what we want it to look like.'"

Not that she complained. She liked the people she worked with. She liked learning a new skill set. She liked her bosses. She liked the money. She liked going out at night with friends, and, a couple times a week getting up at dawn and running up to and around Central Park, then back home. Ten or 12 miles a couple times a week wasn't a lot by her standards. She wished she could exercise more. She might have wished the hours weren't quite as long. She might have wished she had a little more time to read before she fell asleep—she always read before she went to sleep—but she was young and she had a great job, was making a great living. It had taken her seven years to say a sentence about a flying bird correctly. What was there to complain about?

In the fall of 2007, her sister, Angela, who was then 40, called and told Evie to buy some clip-in bike pedals and bring them with her when she flew to California for Thanksgiving. When Evie arrived, Angela showed her little sister the bicycle she'd borrowed for her to ride (it was a green monster, a little too big for Evie, who is 5-foot-5 and then weighed about 126 pounds), and showed her how to clip her shoes into the pedals. Evie struggled with that, but she was always game for new things, and once she got the hang of it, Angela and Angela's boyfriend and Evie took off. The first day they rode up and down Mount Tamalpais, 60 miles, and Evie kept up.

The day after riding up Mount Tam, the trio drove to a cyclocross race, where, as they warmed up, Evie struggled again with the shoes. Angela had to take off with her boyfriend to make her own start time, and she left her little sister. Evie managed to clip into her pedals, managed to make it to the starting line. She even managed to finish the race, despite crashing a few times.

Afterward, the sisters joked about the race, about the crashes, about Evie's difficulty with her pedals. No one made any jokes about the muddy beginnings of a glorious new career. That was too ludicrous to imagine, even as a joke.

But when she got back to New York City, Evie went shopping for a bicycle. Clerks asked her what she was looking for. Carbonfiber fork? DuraAce components? Mavic wheels?

They might as well have been speaking Mandarin. She liked riding. She liked going fast. She didn't know anything about bicycle technology, and didn't particularly care. She ended up with a maroon Cannondale, aluminum, with a triple chainring and a huge granny gear in back to help her up steep hills. It cost $1,000. She would ride a few times a week up the bike path next to the West Side Highway, early in the morning, then she would do a few loops around Central Park. It was still winter, and it was cold, but she loved the feel of freedom, and the speed, and she loved pushing herself up the hills.

She told Angela how much fun she was having.

"But she was clueless," Angela says. "I'd say, you have to buy a pump. And you need this and that. I gave her a list of what she'd need to change a tire, and reviewed how to change one." Still, the first time Evie got a flat, she called her sister on her cell phone for instructions. Angela sent a package of bike clothing—shorts, jersey, vest, arm warmers—because she thought Evie shouldn't be riding in her ski jacket and running pants. Angela told her sister to be sure to eat before—and sometimes during—her long rides. It took a few times bonking before Evie listened.

Other riders noticed her. They noticed her strength on hills and her speed. A guy on a fancy bike in Central Park asked if she wanted to ride with him, if she wanted to try riding with a pack. She did.

A few of the guys in the pack rode with her across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. During a stop on the ride, one of the guys with a watch told her to climb one of the big hills—about a mile and a half—as fast as she could. Fast, competitive men going all-out usually hit the top in just over six minutes.

The investment banker on the $1,000 bike did it in less than six minutes.

The other riders told her about an upcoming racing clinic put on by the Century Road Club Association (CRCA), an event where rank amateurs and enthusiasts like Evie could learn some of the craft of competitive cycling. Afterward, there would be a mock race. It wasn't like she was going to quit her job in finance and become a professional bicycle racer—she just wanted to try something new. She'd always been an optimist, welcomed new challenges. To be a government and gender studies major working on Wall Street, one needs to be an optimist. To lisp and attend speech-therapy classes every day of grade school, and to dream of becoming president of your country, an eye for silver linings is required.

She finished sixth out of about 30 riders. "I thought, this was awesome," she remembers. "I want to bike race. The adrenaline rush. The competition." A week later, she entered a real race, Union Vale, in upstate New York. It finished on a big climb. It might as well have been designed for her. It was her first cycling victory, and she wanted more.

In July she won a time trial in the Giro del Cielo and finished first in a road race called the NCC Tour of the Hilltowns. Then came the Green Mountain Stage Race, the day Evie and her granny gear passed the pros. She had changed jobs, going to an investment fund called Gleacher Mezzanine, and was now living in Greenwich Village. The hours were still long, and the money was still good. She still had her nights out with friends. But she also had this new obsession, and something had to give.

"A lot of my friends said, 'Oh, what happened to you?,'" Stevens remembers. That's because she would return from work every night at eight or nine, turn on the television set, mount her training bicycle in her living room and proceed to ride. Eventually, dinners and drinks were out, along with a lot of other social activities. Matthew Koschara, a former professional racer turned coach who lived in New York City, met Stevens and rode with her, and had given her specific workouts—speed and distance and intervals. "Her longer weeks," Koschara says, "she would have been approaching [riding] 20 hours. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening. It was basically ride, work, go to bed, or work, ride, go to bed. There's no way I would bring up, 'Hey, did you see that movie?' Because I would have known there's no way she would have seen that movie."

She finished in 13th place, as a category 3/4 rider, in the Lou Maltese Memorial race in New York City. In February 2009, she flew to Arizona to take part in the four-stage Valley of the Sun Race. In the individual time trial, she flatted and finished dead last, 61st. The next day she won the road race, and the day after that, she finished second in the criterium. That happened to be one of the days that chronic results watcher Jim Miller was checking the Internet. That's when he sent her the email, asking what her story was.

In March, she finished second in the Grant's Tomb Criterium. The next month she won the Tour of the Battenkill and then won the Tour de Ephrata. In May she won the Cadence Tour de Parc and the Jiminy Peak Road Race and the Bear Mountain Spring Classic.

"She'd send me text messages," Angela says. "And they would always be, 'I won, I won, I won.' After a while, it was like, 'How many more races are you going to win?'"

Quite a few more, as it turns out. In May 2009 she won the Hartford Downtown Criterium. She was an elite rider now, Cat 1, and right before the Fourth of July weekend, she told her bosses at Gleacher Mezzanine that she was leaving finance. Unlike most of the associates, who leave for business school, usually the University of Chicago or Wharton, Stevens was going to try to become a professional athlete.

Over the Fourth of July, riding for Team Lip Smackers, Evie won the Fitchburg Longsjo Classic, beating pros Jeannie Longo and Tina Pic. She followed that up a few weeks later by winning the Cascade Cycling Classic stage race, in Oregon.

By the time she had completed her unlikely 15th place finish in the World Championships in Switzerland, she had given up her New York City apartment, was planning to move to the San Francisco Bay area, and had accepted a 2010 professional contract with HTCColumbia, considered the best women's cycling team in the world.

"To go from where she was in June of 2008 to where she is now," Koschara says, "you just don't see that. Back in the day, before there was as much organization, and as much reward, you would have people appear out of nowhere and win big races...but she was working 50 plus hours a week up until the end of June. It's just remarkable. But her temperament is really unusual. So many other athletes are reluctant to give up things. She's been amazing in being able to focus for so long. It's not so unusual for someone to come up and have a single great race, a couple great results. But to have her come up and string together so many great results in her first year, it's left a lot of people speechless."

Last August, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Stevens that outlined her elite physiology. The headline was "Cycling's One-in-a-Million Story." USA Cycling's Miller, the empiricist, demurs. "Every two years in America we have a girl who comes up to her level," he says. "You have someone like Mara Abbot, like Kristin Armstrong, like Amber Neben. She's not a freak of nature. She's good. She's a good climber, she has a big engine. What strikes me about Evie is she's intelligent, and she's smart. She can watch things happen, and replicate them. Now it's a lot of hard work and effort. To go from being a good rider to a great rider, that's up to her."

When she meets me for coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, on a bright, chilly Indian summer morning, she wears black leggings and a yellow Columbia racing jersey and flip-flops. She is lean, at 120 pounds six pounds lighter than her finance days, and obviously fit. She looks like a lot of other young women from the neighborhood, the attractive and lean
executives and financiers and yoginis and Pilates addicts and moisturized gym rats, but much less harried, much more relaxed. Happier. Part of that has to do with her predisposition toward sunniness. Part has to do with her new life. ("I came back from a ride," she told a reporter in late summer, describing her new life, "ate, surfed the Web, wrote e-mails, read books, hung out. It's really nice, actually."

She is staying at a friend's place in the neighborhood. She has been living as a houseguest since May 2009, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, with occasional stops at her parents' house in Dennis, Massachusetts. Recently she e-mailed her friends, asking if anyone knew of a cheap rental in Marin County, California, or someone looking for a roommate. That's where she intends to move, because it will be easier to train, and to be near her sister, Angela, who had her first daughter in September.

She says she has a lot to learn. And while she's happy if a story about a woman cyclist will get people interested in the sport—especially little girls—she is relentlessly humble. Other racers are far more accomplished than she is, she says. She has lots to learn from them, she says. She needs to prove herself, she says. She just wants to be a good cyclist, to do what her coach tells her to do, to be a good team member, to help the people she's supposed to help. She'll wait her turn, she says. She just wants to be worthy.

While Stevens is chipper and disinclined to offend and seems to positively exude an aw-shucks girl-next-door humility and charm, she is, as everyone who knows her attests, very smart and focused. The elite riders laughed and encouraged her when she was a Category 3/4 racer passing them on a hill (before they collected themselves and dropped her—"Make sure to include that, that they passed me"). But she knows that, now that she's a pro, too, earning a finite amount of pro money, vying for a finite amount of pro publicity, the other racers' delight in her unlikely rise might be slightly more nuanced, more subtle. Though she doesn't dwell on it, Stevens can imagine the response of a veteran racer to all the hoopla surrounding the dimpled newcomer from Wall Street.

She doesn't smoke or do drugs, and since April 2009 has rarely consumed alcohol, though she never drank much to start with. She eats five meals a day, is particularly fond of avocados, oatmeal and turkey burgers. She hates goat cheese and has a weakness for peanut butter in all forms and Ghostbutter cones from Tasti-Delight. She likes frozen yogurt, too. She has a weakness for sweets of all kinds. She likes eggs and hard-boils them often. She tries to be in bed every night by 11, and reads before she goes to sleep. She is particularly fond of detective fiction, especially when the gumshoe is a woman. She sleeps nine hours a night: "I love to sleep," she says.

She doesn't like to eat late, and, "If I could have dinner by six every night, I would." She likes coffee and has at least one Diet Coke a day, but, per Koschara's suggestions, is trying to cut caffeine altogether. She does not like being referred to as a "girl." She won't talk to cyclists who aren't wearing helmets. She won't even acknowledge them. "I don't want to be there when the blood comes gushing out. That would be very traumatizing." (She laughs when she says this, but she's serious about not talking to helmetless riders.)

She knows very little about pop culture because she doesn't watch television. (During the winter when she worked in finance and rode indoors, however, she would watch television while training, and was as well versed in celebrity scandal as anyone.) She doesn't have to wear heels now, or suits. She can wear whatever she wants and is happy about that. She never loved fashion. She says something funny about young, wealthy women in New York City spending lots of money on shoes, then she spends approximately 15 minutes insisting that the quote be stricken, or changed, or softened. She explains that she doesn't want to offend anyone who owns expensive shoes, or who gets a kick out of shoe shopping, but that she also doesn't want to offend women who don't wear expensive shoes, and yeah, one of the other pros she met at a publicity event the other day suggested she take some media training. After 20 minutes, she settles on this statement: "I have never owned a pair of Jimmy Choos."

She adores her new Scott bicycle, and it is beautiful and sleek, but her enthusiasm is at least partly influenced by the fact that Scott is one of the sponsors of her team. In truth, Stevens is probably one of the most technology-clueless professional cyclists in the world. "A lot of people riding are really into their equipment," she says. "I'm more into winning and going fast." When asked what size her wheels are, she laughs. "Twenty inches? Twenty-six? I don't know."

She says she enjoys the travel and the challenge of her new life. "People call me and say, 'You're like the real-life Walter Mitty.' But if you think about it, it [leaving her job] might not have been the most intelligent thing to do. No, that's not right. Say this: It might have been risky, but it's the best decision I have ever made. I've met a gazillion different types of people." She knows that unless she becomes one of the top three or four female cyclists in the world, she won't get rich. "If I were really concerned about money, I would have stayed in finance," she says. (USA Cycling's Miller says middle-of-the-pack female pros might earn $25,000 a year, compared with six figures for their male counterparts.)

Whether she gets rich, and whether she possesses a one-in-a-million physiology, is unclear. What's incontrovertible is that her rise from a desk job to professional cycling in a year and a half is amazing even according to Jim Miller's it-happens-once-every-two-years perspective. It is also inarguable that Evie Stevens's short, happy ride from Wall Street to professional cycling is one of the most grin-inducing, head-wagging tales you will ever hear, especially in this era of doping, transnational finger-pointing and blood feuds (between teammates). What's less easy to say is how Stevens will fare in her new life.

"Evelyn is quite an anomaly because she hasn't been riding very long," says Kristy Scrymgeour, marketing manager of HTCColumbia's women's team, a former racer herself. "She's barely done one full year of racing. I think she's got the opportunity to be a great racer."

Koschara is less circumspect.

"Her greatest strength is that she has a really, really good tactical sense," he says. "You can't teach someone the killer instinct. She can sense how the race is unfolding and then react in a way that's to her betterment. She can sense how the race is developing then pick the right moment—she couldn't have had the results she has had without an innate sense of how the race is unfolding. Can I think of anyone who has achieved that level of success, that early? Yeah: Lance Armstrong. But someone who came out of nowhere and achieved those kinds of results? No."

I ask Stevens about those world championships in Switzerland, that incredible result. She says it was one of the great experiences of her life. "That was a pinch-myself kind of moment. I've had a lot of pinch-myself kinds of moments in the last year."

Her job was to set pace, to stretch out the field, to make sure the other riders were expending huge amounts of energy climbing the massive hills, so that the USA's star, Kristin Armstrong (who ended up crashing but finished in fourth place), would be in position to win the championship. The sport's feel-good story led the greatest riders in the world up hill after hill. Barely a year from owning a pair of cycling shoes, Stevens managed to maneuver through the pack, to avoid crashing, to corner, to do all the things she knows she will have to improve upon. Then she got to ride hard, to go all-out. She got to climb really fast. And she loved it. It was like a fairy tale.

"I wanted to do my job one hundred and ten percent," she says. "I wanted to show that I could contribute to the team, because in order to win a medal, you have to have a team that works together. By the end of the race I knew I had done my job.

"Yeah, that was nice."

Then she pauses, takes a sip of the coffee she will be giving up soon, as her life continues to change, as she morphs from perky newcomer to seasoned veteran. Then the girl next door smiles again, and this time flashes just a gleaming bit of fang.

"But I would personally rather be winning than in 15th place."

Writer-at-large Steve Friedman's profile of cyclist Jonathan Boyer will be published in The Best American Sports Writing 2010. His fourth book, Driving Lessons, will be published by Rodale in June 2011.